


Lived and Loved

by bellagerantalii



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Memory Modification, Natasha Has the Best Friends, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Red Room, Shamelessly Stealing from the Comics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-12 21:10:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4494807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellagerantalii/pseuds/bellagerantalii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In hindsight, she probably should have known better. She’s been made and unmade so many times that she doesn’t even remember her actual birthday, let alone her parents or any family. </p>
<p>After Natasha releases the SHIELD and HYRDA files to the public, she uses the new information to trace her own past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this is me trying to tie in comics canon with the MCU. Title comes from Marjorie Liu's Black Widow run: 'The Name of the Rose.'

It turns out there’s more red in Natasha’s ledger than she ever imagined.

In hindsight, she probably should have known better. She’s been made and unmade so many times that she doesn’t even remember her actual birthday, let alone her parents or any family. She remembers some of the Red Room. She particularly remembers the graduation ceremony, when she’d exchanged sterility for… for something. She remembers pride mixed in with the fear as the doctors wheeled her into the operating room. She remembers her teachers. She remembers shadows of men and women. She remembers feeling satisfaction at jobs done right. 

The files she dumps on the internet don’t reveal everything, but they reveal enough. They reveal hints of a HYDRA cell in the NKVD and later the KGB. Although the Red Room existed well before World War II (or the Great Patriotic War, as Natasha remembers it being called somewhere in her youth), HYDRA scientists soon took over the project, and all of Department X. According to HYDRA’s files within SHIELD, the new scientists changed the program from a production line of deadly assassins to a program of damn near invincible ones. 

And the files mention Natasha as the first graduate of the Black Widow program to receive HYDRA’s modified version of a super-soldier serum. Her ‘graduation date’ is 1947. 

And that’s where the hints end. The HYDRA operations in SHIELD and the KGB kept in contact, and occasionally did each other favors, but each jealously guarded its own secrets. Only when the Soviet Union fell, and half the world was sent into disarray, was the SHIELD faction of HYDRA finally able to put renewed plans of world domination into motion.

But the threat level from HYDRA is minimal, at least for now. The most Natasha has to worry about at the moment are wrinkled senators and generals breathing down her neck. 

She refuses Fury’s offer to root out the rest of HYDRA. She even turns down Steve’s request that she join him in his quest to find Barnes. She does hand him a folder, though, and just a look at the pictures paper clipped to the front are enough for her. If she chose to go with Steve, they would each be searching for a different person, and Natasha isn’t ready to tell Steve what she suspects about his friend. 

So she goes to find her best friend.

“How many of the files have you read?” Clint asks the morning after Natasha arrives. They’re busy stripping and re-staining the baby crib in preparation for the Barton family’s latest addition. Clint’s going for a light Birchwood finish this time, and Laura’s said something about painting the baby’s room some shade of green.

“Most of them,” she replies, adjusting her grip on the hand sander. 

“So when are we celebrating your birthday, grandma?” Clint jokes, and Natasha can see tell he’s smiling under the protective mask he’s wearing.

“Depends on what I find out in Moscow. But who knows. It may be time to reinvent myself yet again.”

“Do you have any idea about what you’ll find?” Clint says, putting down his sander and leaning against the outside wall of the barn. He moves to take his mask off, and holds it in his hand. Nat follows suit, and soon they’re sitting side-by-side in the shade of the barn, taking turns sipping from the flask Clint keeps hidden in his larger toolbox. 

“Some,” Natasha says, taking a swig, “There’ve always been things I can’t place. I’ve always assumed that the KGB got to me before the 80s, but I never imagined that what I remembered as a child came from the 1930s.”

“Guess it is a little hard to tell in Soviet Russia,” Clint jokes, heavily accenting the last three words. Natasha punches him in the arm, just hard enough to sting a little, but smiles as she does it so Clint knows she finds him ridiculous, and just a little endearing.

“Um, ow. Show some respect to your psychological counselor, Romanov,” Clint laughs, his eyes crinkling. But then his smile drops, and his face gets deadly serious and dangerously sincere.

“You know, whatever happened, whatever you find out, none of it is your fault. You were just a kid when they got you. You can’t blame yourself for being used for half a lifetime.”

“Will you ever forgive yourself for the things you did while you were unmade?” Natasha asks, looking her friend dead in the eye.

“No. But my best friend told me that I couldn’t afford to think like that. Not when there’s a job to finish.”

Natasha shakes her head, but she gives Clint a swift peck on the cheek. 

 

It’s hovering around seventy degrees when she arrives in Moscow, a welcome change from the sweltering summer of the American East Coast. Using her tried and true techniques, she travels with a false passport she managed to keep hidden from SHIELD and takes a roundabout way from the airport to her hotel. She watches her back carefully for anyone following her, and is surprised, but not relieved, to spot no one. When she gets to her hotel, she checks her line of sight from the window, sweeps the room for bugs, and does a little bit of spying on her neighbors.  
The room to her right is occupied by a businessman from Minsk and his Moscow-based mistress. The mistress is a naïve little brunette secretary who actually believes her dashing forty-something lover will leave his well-connected wife and three children for her. The girl is barely out of university, judging by the contents of her suitcase (faded underwear and almost-new business casual for work, with the addition of dainty new negligées and one stunning evening gown), and the man calls his children each night while his lover prepares for whatever fantasy he has in mind. 

The room on Natasha’s left is less interesting-- a couple of octogenarian sisters from Volgograd up to spend a long weekend in Moscow. Their tickets to the ballet are safety stashed in the room’s safe, and the younger sister travels with faded color photographs of her children and grandchildren.

Natasha spends most of her first day walking around the city, especially the parts that haven’t been touched by economic booms. She goes down back alleys she almost remembers, and spends the night leaping from building to building based on almost-faded muscle memory. 

She walks down a street near where the Bolshoi used to hold practices. She gets a flash of another recruit: this one has dark hair, and she’s pleading with Natasha to go back. Back to the Red Room, or so Natasha assumes.

As soon as it comes, the vision vanishes, and Natasha finds herself frozen on the sidewalk as the clock tower down the street chimes five fifteen and people begin to stream out of the offices that now line to road.

 

The next afternoon finds her seated at a secluded corner table in a downtown café popular with shoppers. The naïve ones take tables outside in the sunshine, ignorant or uncaring of the air pollution. 

Sergei is late. He always is, but the information he can provide Natasha is slightly more valuable than her time. When he finally does arrive, the until-now attentive wait staff barely glances at him. As always, he’s dressed in a suit that’s neither notable for its cost nor shabbiness, although the cut is terrible for him. It does nothing to hide his growing beer belly, and the color washes out his eyes, which are magnified by large circular glasses. In his left hand he holds a well-loved briefcase.

“Natasha, my dear,” he says, hesitating a moment before sitting down. Perhaps he expected Natasha to stand and shake his hand or, better yet, allow him to place a kiss on each of her cheeks. 

“What I always find amazing about you is that you never change,” Natasha says, smiling and hailing a waiter. Sergei is about to respond when the waiter arrives, and Natasha orders another cup of coffee for herself, one for Sergei, and an assortment of the café’s pastries.

“We old men are set in our ways, child,” he finally says, voice gently chiding. The waiter reappears with their coffee, and promises the pastries will be out soon. Sergei adds a copious amount of sugar to his drink, and occupies himself by dispersing it evenly throughout his cup. 

“Tch. I’m older than you, Sergei, no need to lecture me on the ways of old men.”

Sergei stops stirring, his head whipping up to stare at Natasha.

“So you finally know?” he asks, his voice barely above a whisper.

“It wasn’t very hard to figure out, especially after that little stunt my friends and I pulled over at SHIELD.”

Sergei nods, and begins to stir again in silence. The plate of pastries arrives before he starts to speak again. 

“And you came to me because you want information? My dear Natalia, you must know that I was only a—“

“A minor bureaucrat, yes. I’ve heard the story before, Sergei,” Natasha replies, pushing the tray of pastries at the man, urging him to take one. “But you were a minor bureaucrat who was in charge of making sure the Red Room’s records never saw the light of day. What happened to all those files, Sergei?” 

“I don’t know. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, it was chaos, I was—“

“Oh I know how much you love chaos, Sergei. It’s what your organization thrives on.”

The color drains from Sergei’s face, and he gulps audibly. 

“Personnel files from the KGB faction weren’t—“

“Again, Sergei, it wasn’t hard to figure out,” Natasha smiles toothily, “Although, I’m still unclear as to how the SHIELD faction got a hold of what Arnim Zola’s files called ‘The Asset.’ Or The American, as he was known to us.”

“The American was sometimes lent to our friends to do work that required more… finesse. They stole The American from us just after the country collapsed. The KGB was too dependent on the state, and we couldn’t—“

“Where are the Red Room files?” 

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because I happen to know Captain America. And let me tell you, he’s not very pleased about how his best friend has been treated all these years.”

Large drops of sweat appear on Sergei’s forehead. 

“So I’m making you a deal. You tell me where those files are, and help me with anything I may need, and I’ll make sure Captain Rogers doesn’t find you and throw your ass in prison.”

Sergei spends a long moment staring at her, but then nods his head. Natasha smiles, and takes a chocolate croissant off of the pastry tray.


	2. Chapter 2

By eight o’clock the next morning, Natasha is walking through the staff entrance of the National Archives in Moscow, courtesy of a staff access card she filched from a too-drunk archivist the night before. Said archivist is now at home with a killer hangover, and won’t miss the card until she’s slept off the combination of alcohol and sedatives Natasha slipped to her. 

Dressed in a modest blouse and skirt and pushing an empty cart, Natasha walks through the maze of underground tunnels. There are enough people around that they don’t notice one more, and if they do notice her, they assume she’s a new hire sent to fetch another cartload of files for the researchers upstairs. 

She walks down one final corridor, and swipes her card again. She now has access to some of the more blasé files on the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It’s mainly long calculations about budgets and data, files that have already been probed to death or are too dull for anyone to actually care about. 

It’s the perfect place to hide something you don’t want anyone to find. Especially when the people who are in charge of these files (including the archivist whose pass Natasha swiped) are agents of HYDRA. 

Sergei gave her the locations of the files. They’re scattered around the entire room, and it takes Natasha the better part of the day to locate them all. When she does, she doesn’t read them, but mechanically takes pictures with a camera hidden in her ID badge holder. She leaves most of the lights off, slipping behind a stack of cabinets when someone does come in around lunchtime. Once they leave, she resumes her work.

She gets out as easily as she got in, slips the ID badge under the door of the agent’s apartment, and hops on the first plane out of Moscow.

 

Twenty-six hours later Natasha is uploading the files onto her computer. It makes her ill, looking at the Red Room’s work. There’s a list of all her missions stretching back to the 1940s, and countless reports on her mental state before and after mind wipes. She finds a partial chemical formula for her own version of the Super Solider Serum, which seems to have been roughly based on Armin Zola’s own formula—the one that was used on The American. 

And suddenly Natasha remembers a trembling hand stretched out in front her. Her own hand, softer than it is now. She’s reaching out towards a window edged in ice, and through it she can see the face of a sleeping man. The American. He looks the same as he did on the freeway in DC just a few months ago, but even Natasha can tell this memory is much older than that.

What have they done to you?

Natasha starts, grounding herself back in the here and now. She reaches for her phone.

“Hey, Nat!” Steve says. He must be chasing a lead he considers promising, because his voice has an almost-cheerful tone to it that Nat has only heard once or twice.

“Steve, I think I have a new lead for you. His name is Sergei Rozanov.”

 

Of all the places Natasha thought she would find herself, the bedside of Peggy Carter, legendary founder of SHIELD, is not one of them. And yet here she is, tagging along with Sharon to the comfortable, clean nursing home in Northern Virginia. 

“This is the friend I was telling you about, Aunt Peggy,” Sharon says after kissing her aunt on the forehead. “She’s a friend of Steve’s.”

“Natasha Romanov,” Nat says, extending her hand. Peggy shakes it with a firmness that’s surprising for an almost one hundred year old woman suffering from Alzheimer’s, and she looks Natasha over appraisingly.

“You’re not here just to keep me company in my last days, are you?” 

Sharon lets out a snort, and Natasha smiles.

“Actually, I was hoping if you could give me some information. But if you want to spend the next two hours reminiscing about the old days and playing checkers, then I suppose I’m amenable.”

Now it’s Peggy’s turn to chuckle. “You’re the Red Room defector, aren’t you? The one who came up in the SHIELD files,”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to tell you everything I know about the Red Room. You and I near contemporaries, after all.”

“Yes.”

“And I assume you’ve already chased down old leads and contacts on the Moscow side of things?”

“Of course.”

“Good girl. And what did you learn?”

“I thought I was supposed to be the one asking questions here,” Natasha says, not even trying to hide her smile.

“Let an old woman have her fun. What did you learn?”

“That I was taken into the Red Room when I was a child. When the War came I was barely more than a teenager, and they put me with a Red Army Division in Eastern Europe. I survived, and completed my training in 1947.”

“And they sent you on missions, presumably?”

“There was a list. I don’t remember many of them.”

“Which ones do you remember?”

“Everything from the 1980s and 90s, after they stopped wiping me and after the USSR collapsed.”

“And when did they begin wiping you?”

“Sometime in the 1950s or 60s,” Natasha replies.

“They let you a decade without wiping your memories. Why?”

“The file I found mentions some sort of ‘incident.’ I haven’t been able to find out what it means.”

“Why do you want to find out?”

Natasha hesitates.

“I want to know. I need to know what I’ve done, and what I’ve been used for.”

Peggy is quiet for a moment, but then she nods, like she knows, and smiles.

“Then I’ll tell you what I know, Natasha. What I can remember, anyway.”

 

“The first Red Room graduate I encountered went by the name of Dottie Underwood. It was a false name, of course. In 1946 ‘Leviathan,’ the forerunner of HYRDA in the KGB, sent her to steal Howard Stark’s experimental weapons cache. She was skilled sniper, and an expert in hand-to-hand combat, disguise, espionage, and what we called ‘honeypot’ missions.’”

“We tracked the Red Room to a Leviathan facility near the Russian border, and what we saw there was… disturbing. The poor girls were obviously chained to their beds in huge dormitories at night. There were American-style schoolrooms where they learned to speak perfect English, and were inundated with subliminal messages meant to control them. Does any of this sound familiar?”

“Yes. I remember the handcuffs and the schoolroom. And Leviathan was the original name for the Soviet branch of HYRDA, correct?”

“Yes. Do you remember anything else?”

“They wiped almost everything else. For years I thought I had been studying ballet at the Bolshoi, before an injury ended my career.”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you much beyond that, then. Once I became head of SHILED, I never got a chance to get back into Russia. We had several run-ins with the Red Room program during my time, but we never got much information out of their victims.”

“Those reports are in the files.”

“Yes, and they are now public domain,” Peggy says, a wry smile on her face.

“And you don’t know which operative carried out those missions?”

“I simply don’t know. It may have been you, but unless you can remember, or one of your handlers who survived the purges is still alive, then there’s no way to prove anything.”

“Of course,” Natasha says. “Thank you for your time,” she ends, getting up to leave.

“You’re not going anywhere yet. You owe me a round of some daft board game, or at least a chat about what’s going on in the world.”

“I can do all of those things, Aunt Peggy. Natasha is—“ begins Sharon.

“No offense, darling, but Natasha’s life seems rather more exciting than yours. The CIA… Of all the possible agencies, and you decide to join those imbiciles?”


	3. Chapter 3

“It was nice of you to stay,” Sharon says. She and Natasha are sitting at a table at the overcrowded Dupont Circle Starbucks, drinks in hand. They are as relaxed as they ever are, especially in so public a space.

“I like your aunt. And she seemed to be having a good day, right?”

Sharon smiles. “Yeah, she was. Captain Rogers came to visit her a of couple days ago and she remembered his visit. She’s had a good week.”

“Speaking of Steve, has he called you yet?”

Sharon raises one of her eyebrows skeptically. 

“Are you trying to set me up, Romanov?” she asks, sipping her cappuccino. 

“Maybe. And I’m not the only one, from the sound of it.”

“I think my aunt liked you too much,” Sharon says, rolling her eyes. Once Peggy had figured out just how well Natasha knew Steve, she had immediately brought her in on her scheme to get Sharon and Steve out on a date. 

“He’ll just indulge his workaholic tendencies and brood otherwise,” Peggy had said, masterfully cornering Natasha’s remaining knight on the chessboard (chess was Peggy’s game, not checkers), “And since you’re just as addicted to your work as he is, one date wouldn’t kill you.”

“I am not going to be set up with my aunt’s old flame,” Sharon had replied in the tired tones of someone who’s had this conversation more than once.

“Then I guess it’s up to you to convince her, Natasha,” Peggy said, giving an exaggerated shrug and a sigh. 

 

“I was trying to set you two up well before I met Peggy,” Natasha admits. “I kind of told him to ask you out while you were still undercover as that nurse, and then again over Nick Fury’s fake grave… But then I gave him the information to go look for his friend Barnes, so…”

Sharon laughs, leaning back in her chair. “Well, then I think I’m safe from Captain America’s advances. For now, at least.”

“It’s a shame. You guys would make such a cute couple. Steve has a ‘type,’ and you fit the bill perfectly.”

“As a replacement for my aunt?”

“No. As someone who can kick his ass and tell him he’s being ridiculous. He can be an overly righteous bastard.”

“You’re not making him sound very attractive, you know.”

“I’m trying a new tactic here.”

“And it’s still not working. But enough about me and the American icon you want to set me up with,” Sharon says good-naturedly enough, but Natasha can tell her friend has reached her limit. “What about you? You’ve been remembering things,” she adds, her tone serious and her face concerned.

“When you were younger, what did you want to be?” Nat asks.

“I wanted to be like my aunt. But don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not. You wanted to be like your aunt. You wanted to be the best at what you do, right?”

“Of course. But I still don’t see—“

“I wanted the same thing. From what I can remember about the Red Room, what I just know are real memories, I know that wanted to be the best. I wanted to be the best fighter, the best spy, and the best interrogator. I wanted to be better than all the other girls.”

“You are the best at what you do,” Sharon admits, admiration in her voice.

“But what did I give up to get what I wanted? And was it worth it?” 

Natasha hasn’t told anyone about the Graduation Ceremony. Confessing to another person about something she doesn’t even want to admit herself seems idiotic. And now, even when she’s started to look at it herself, admitting it to other people seems shameful.

“Nat, from what you’ve told me about the Red Room, it doesn’t sound like there was much free will involved,” Sharon says, her voice pitched low and consoling. 

“There wasn’t, but I could have done something,” Nat replies, letting out a deep breath as she does.

“You were a _child_ ,” Sharon says, covering Nat’s hand with hers on the table. “You can’t expect to be responsible for whatever they did.”

“I fought in the war for a few years. I could have left then. I knew what the outside world was like and I chose to go back.”

“Do you even remember what happened during the war? It could have just added to the great Soviet fervor they’d programmed into you.”

“I… I don’t know what I did, but I still could have left.”

“Dottie Underwood knew what the outside world was like, too, and she went back.”

“Thanks. Comparing me to your aunt’s nemesis really makes me feel better.”

“That’s not what I meant. What I’m saying is that you went through the same indoctrination that she did, and then you fought through a war, and war fucks with people.”

Natasha sighs. After Steve, Sharon is the most stubborn person she knows. If the two of them ever do end up dating, their arguments will be incredible to watch. 

“You’re right,” she says, making her body relax a little. She takes a sip of coffee, and studies Sharon over the rim of the cup. Natasha can tell from the way Sharon has her hand placed on her chin and her brow furrowed that she isn’t satisfied, but that she’ll drop the conversation for now.

“Finish up,” Sharon says briskly. “We’re going to the shooting range.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Thank you for all the kudos and wonderful comments. :) I finally have the fic finished, and nearly the way I like it. I'll be updating a lot more regularly, and will hopefully have the whole thing up by the end of the month.

Natasha calls Steve a few days after her outing with Sharon, thinking to make good on her promises to Peggy. However, instead of a playful argument about whether or not Steve has time to ask anyone out, she’s immediately enlisted to help destroy the last remnants of HYDRA. How can she say no?

The whole gang is back together. Thor is back on Earth, Clint’s been coerced away from Laura and his kids, Steve has apparently left the search for Bucky to Sam, and Banner and Stark are even amenable about leaving their labs at Stark Tower. Even Maria Hill has signed on for the job, which makes Natasha feel better about the entire operation. 

Punching and kicking bad guys is something she can do. The remaining HYDRA cells they’re taking down are about as black-and-white ‘evil’ as Natasha will ever see in her life, and it’s even occasionally fun. 

She wishes the activity would help her forget about the dreams this new crusade seems to have stirred up.

She’s sick of them. A decade ago she would have given anything to remember, but now she wishes they’d go away. Every time she closes her eyes she can expect to see the same man. Sometimes he’s dressed in a plain military uniform, and sometimes he’s in full dress regalia and gleaming with medals and pins. One night Natasha catches a glimpse of the much coveted, rarely awarded “Hero of the Soviet Union” medal pinned crookedly on the man’s chest. 

Alexei, you’ve pinned it wrong again. You don’t want the generals know you’re a slob now, do you?

But that is what I have you for, my love.

Natasha awakes with a start. She has a name now. Alexei. She hasn’t come across that name in her files yet, but then again she’s only up to 1955. 

At least hunting HYRDA leaves her exhausted. She only considers Alexei for a few minutes before she drifts off back to sleep.

 _Mrs. Shostakova_ , someone in the distance says.

 _Mrs. Shostakova, There’s been an… accident._

_Is Alexei alright? Where is he?_

_He is dead._

Natasha wakes up in a cold sweat, breathing hard. She feels her heart constricting in her chest, and lies flat on her back, breathing slowly and evenly until she feels close to normal again. 

She has no desire to go back to sleep, so she throws a hoodie over the tank top and sweats she sleeps in and heads down to the common area of ‘Avengers’ Tower. It’s going on four in the morning, and no one is usually awake at this hour, which is why she’s surprised to see Doctor Banner sprawled out on the couch watching reruns of Saturday Night Live. He doesn’t realize Natasha’s entered the room until she slides onto the other end of the couch. He starts, throwing his hands up.

“Jesus. Don’t sneak up on a man like that,” he says wearily, rubbing his hand over his eyes.

“Sorry. I’ll be sure to announce me presence next time,” Natasha replies, probably a little more testily than necessary. She’s literally been trained to enter rooms silently since the 1930s, and she’s perturbed that Banner is basically asking her to unlearn years of training. 

Banner gives her a probing look, and Natasha meets his eyes so that he’ll look away. He doesn’t.

“Can’t sleep?” he hazards.

“I guess I’m still coming off an adrenaline high from the mission we ran today. Couldn’t get comfortable.”

Banner nods, accepting this explanation. 

“And you?” Natasha asks, raising her eyebrow. 

“Adrenaline may not be the best term to describe it.”

“Guilt, then?” asks Natasha, remembering the HYDRA bunker reduced to rubble by the Hulk. They’d managed to pull most of the people trapped inside free after several hours of careful work. It took even longer to find the Hulk, who had run off. Natasha and Clint finally found him in a clearing, gripping a tree as his face contorted, Banner clearly fighting to regain control. 

Banner diverts his gaze, and Natasha knows she’s hit the nail on the head. 

“You’re gaining more and more control each time we unleash the Other Guy. That’s progress, Bruce. That’s something to be proud of.”

“I killed people today, Natasha.”

“Everyone on this team has killed people. Today, for example, you killed one Neo-Nazi bent on world domination.”

“And how many have you killed, Ms. Romanov, that you can talk about it so casually?”

Natasha’s face twitches for just a moment. “Not enough to make the guilt go away,” she says, lying just a little. “Avengers don’t kill” is all well and good for people like Bruce and Steve, but Natasha operates best in shades of gray.

“When you learn to be good at what you do, you learn how to minimize casualties,” she continues. “The best way to control the Other Guy is to get in as much field experience as possible.”

Bruce looks at her, his expression softened somewhat, but he says nothing.

“When I was… A new SHIELD agent, I sometimes had trouble shaking off the programming I had taken with me from the Red Room. When that happened, Barton and I had a grounding technique.”

“Which was?”

“I usually managed to keep it together until the end of a fight. After the bad guys were bagged and tagged, Barton would apply pressure to the base of my neck. I made myself focus on that touch.” A touch that meant that Clint wanted her calm and okay. The touch that wasn’t followed by pain. A gentle, platonic touch that asked nothing of her.

Natasha hadn’t had many of those in her life.

“I think the Hulk is going to need more than a modified PTSD treatment to calm down,” Bruce replies, his frown overwhelmed by the weariness in his voice and posture.

“You had a girlfriend, didn’t you? Betty, right?”

Bruce starts, and his eyes go wide. 

“What does she have to do with this?”

“You were on the run with her for awhile. She managed to calm you down, right? I read the file.”

“Has everyone here read my file?”

“Haven’t you read ours?”

“No. I thought it was an invasion of privacy.”

“Your chivalry is admirable, Dr. Banner, but please answer my question.”

“Fine. Yes. Betty… I could see reason, with her. When I was the Other Guy with her.”

“And did she do anything, or, pardon how this is going to sound, touch you anywhere that made you feel calm or safe?”

After a momentary blush, Bruce seems to consider what Natasha is saying.

“Yes. My forearms. And my chest. But we can’t have Betty anywhere near where the Hulk is.”

“We’re not going to drag her into a firefight, don’t worry. Just… Try and remember exactly what she did. I’ll get Steve’s friend Sam here in the next few days, and I’m sure we can figure something out.”

“And Steve’s friend Sam is?”

“Unaffiliated with SHIELD. He’s a counselor down at the VA in DC. He’s an Air Force vet.”

Bruce seems unmoved.

“He’s also Cap’s first non-work friend in the twenty-first century.”

Bruce chuckles, a hint of a smile finding its way to his lips. 

“Well, if that’s the case, I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

 

“So the couple of times Betty was able to calm you down, she applied pressure here-“ Sam touches each of Bruce’s forearms, “and here?” he finishes, placing his hands lightly on Bruce’s chest. Natasha is sitting slightly off the side, watching the interaction.

“Uhh, yes. And she talked to me.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t… I don’t actually remember. I just remember where I could feel her.”

Bruce has a faraway look in his eyes, and he’s obviously somewhere other than his office in Stark Tower, where this consultation (if you can call it that) is taking place. Sam glances at Nat, and then clears his throat. Bruce’s eyes refocus.

“Sorry about that,” he says, taking his glasses off his face and cleaning them on his lab coat in a well-practiced, automatic motion.

“If I may ask, Dr. Banner, where is Betty--Dr. Ross--now?”

“She’s not coming anywhere near the Hulk,” Banner says quickly.

“I’m not suggesting that she follow the Avengers into every tussle with HYDRA. Even I’m not crazy enough to do that,” says Sam, smiling reassuringly, “I’m just asking you if you know where she is.”

Banner puts his glasses back on, but avoids looking at Sam or Nat.

“She recently got a tenured position at Columbia University,” he admits.

“Have you ever thought of maybe giving her a call?”

“I don’t want her anywhere near the Hulk.”

“She doesn’t have to be near the Hulk. What I’m trying to get at here… Is Dr. Bruce Banner better when Dr. Elizabeth Ross is around? Is she a reason for you to find control? Is she a reason—“

“We’re not dragging Betty into this, and if you try, I will leave this team.”

“Okay,” Sam says, and Natasha has never been more grateful for his patience. “If we’re going to do this, then, we need to identify someone on the team who the Hulk will listen to.”

“He listens to Cap,” Natasha volunteers. 

“This is different. Cap orders. He knows what he’s doing, but I have a feeling that the Hulk will not take kindly to Cap telling him to leave,” Banner adds. 

“And Steve isn’t exactly a calming presence in that uniform. Neither are Thor or Stark, for that matter,” Sam says, swiveling around in his chair to stare at Natasha. 

“It needs to be you, Nat,” he says, a wicked smile on his face.

“Yes. Because ‘calming’ is absolutely a word people use to describe me.”

“Well, you’re better than all our other options.”

“And the point is that you can pretend to be a calming presence,” Bruce adds quietly. “You managed to wheedle Loki’s plan out of him no problem.”

“I was playing off of what he expected of me. ‘Calm’ is still not the word to use.”

“You’re our best option, Nat,” Sam cuts in, his voice stern and resolute. It’s a tone he’s picked up from Steve, and Nat isn’t sure if she likes it. Still, she looks over at Banner, who’s slumping in his chair again.

“Alright,” she says, sighing just a little. “How are we going to do this?”

Sam smiles, and Banner sits up a little straighter.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I said I would get the rest of this up by the end of August... Maybe I lied a little. My fall semester starts tomorrow, and the last few days have been busier than I anticipated. But I'm going to post two chapters today to try and make it up to you lovely people.

Reading through her files is the best and worst part of Natasha’s day. On the one hand, it’s liberating to finally be able to place fragments of memories—a training exercise in 1954, a mission gone bad in 1956. She has a past now, a real past. 

On the other hand, it’s excruciating. The files mention so many things she doesn’t remember, and it’s frustrating because she remains detached from them. There’s just so much she doesn’t remember, and it’s like reading a book of someone else’s sins, instead of her own. And then, of course, there are the actual missions themselves. Nat prides herself on her strong stomach, but the details of some of the missions she ran, and the nightmares that come after, are enough to make her sick. One night Clint finds her curled up on the cold tile floor of her bathroom, wedged between the toilet and the bathtub. He says nothing, but he slowly moves Natasha until she’s sitting upright against the tub. He wets a washcloth and places it on her head, then makes her rest her head on his shoulder. He spends the rest of the night rubbing soft circles into Natasha’s back. Neither of them get any sleep. 

It only happens once. 

On her better nights she dreams that she’s holding the files in her hand, but before she can open them, they seep through with red blood, coating her hands and arms, pulling her in.

And the other dreams keep on coming. She keeps dreaming about Alexei Shostakov, whoever he is. She can’t tell for sure if he was a target or a lover, but the tone of the dreams change so much that Natasha isn’t sure if she ever will be able to tell. Some nights she wakes up with tears in her eyes after a Soviet officer with his face in the shadows tells her that Alexei is dead. Some nights she feels she’s meeting Alexei for the first time—he stands ramrod straight, his uniform meticulously cared for, but his face is kind and his mouth is one that smiles easily. After these dreams, Natasha wakes up with a sense of resigned indifference. 

And still there are other dreams. Ones where she and Alexei are tangled together in their bed, biting down on pillows and each other to keep from crying out and disturbing their neighbors in the apartment block. When she wakes up from these dreams, Natasha checks her neck and shoulders for any tenderness, almost sure that Alexei is a mixture of dream and reality. She never finds any bruises, though, or any evidence that someone else has been in her apartment. 

The system she’s worked out with Banner is going well, though. Stark’s taken to calling them “lullabies,” since the first time they try it in combat Bruce falls straight to sleep afterwards. At least he managers to change back into a human before he does, as hauling a sleeping Hulk back to the Quinjet is not something Natasha, or any of the team members, want to think about. 

And Dr. Banner is getting attached to her. He probably doesn’t even know it himself, but he is. The Hulk will listen to Natasha, and Banner, even though Natasha can tell he doesn’t quite trust her, is falling for… Whoever Natasha is at the moment. 

Which presents Natasha with a problem. Sure, a kind of adorable, highly intelligent, and extremely kind man likes her. For any normal person, pursuing him would be a no-brainer, at least for one date. Natasha, however, doesn’t want to compromise the tentative trust she has with the Hulk, nor does she really want to date anyone while she’s such a mess. 

Still, she and Bruce are about as far from normal as you can get, and they regularly rub shoulders with a Norse god. Maybe, if Natasha is destined for happiness, the only place she’ll be able to find it is with another messed-up human on her team of monsters. 

And suddenly the team is clearing out the last HYDRA base. It’s not the easiest fight they’ve ever won, but they make it out with minimal damage. For one heart-stopping moment, Natasha thinks they’ve lost Clint, but he’s fully conscious within hours, sassing Stark while they fly back to New York. 

The team is about to break apart, though, and Natasha has no idea when she’ll see any of them again. If she wants to pursue this thing with Banner, she needs to do it now. Victory ‘revels’ are in a few days, and Banner will probably quietly drift off to the side, wringing his hands and playing with his glasses, watching everyone nervously. It will be the perfect time for Natasha to initiate something.

As soon as she’s satisfied that Clint will make a full recovery, Natasha slips off to her suite in Stark tower to get some much-needed sleep. She might even be tired enough not to dream tonight. 

She’s wrong. For some reason, it’s her worst night yet. It begins with Alexei screaming as his test plane hurtles towards the ground, totally engulfed in flames, but then he’s gently stroking her hair, murmuring endearments as she tries to read a book. The scene changes, and a man whose face Natasha associates with the Red Room circles her.

_Widow, you are to marry Alexei Shostakov, the Red Guardian. Your marriage will be a triumph of Soviet science, and bring honor to the motherland._

_It is an honor to be chosen as such a man’s wife. I am proud to bring glory to my country,_ Natasha replies, and even when dreaming the subtle hitch in her voice is noticeable. 

_And you will forget about the American, Natalia Romanovna._

_You wish me to forget all that I have learned from him?_

_What you have learned, ha! You know what I’m talking about, girl, and we’ll see that you forget._

Two men who had been standing by the door reach out and grab her, shoving a handkerchief dipped in chloroform to her face. Natasha passes out in her dream, and wakes up to the sun creeping in through her blinds. 

She leaps out of bed, boots up her laptop, and does a search through the files for ‘Alexei Shostakov,’ She can’t stand going through the files in chronological order anymore—she has to know who Alexei is now. 

The first hit is from 1956. In a memo, a higher-up in Department X proposes marrying the Black Widow, Natasha Romanov, to Alexei Shostakov, the Red Guardian, the Soviet Union’s answer to Captain America. The purpose of the marriage would be to ensure husband and wife’s loyalty to Department X and the Red Room. The memo is followed by the minutes of a brief meeting, where the marriage was discussed, but not seriously considered.

Then everything begins to pick up again in late 1957, and the documents continually reference the Black Widow’s “involvement” with the American. The memos and minutes now have a sense of urgency that even Natasha can detect sixty years later. 

In February 1959, Natasha’s memory is wiped for the first time. In April of the same year, the Black Widow married the Red Guardian. 

Three years later, Alexei Shostakov’s death is faked in order to ensure Natasha’s continued allegiance to Department X.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this fic was actually first conceived as a way to explain why the whole Bruce/Natasha thing happened in AoU. I also really wanted to explore the Natasha's personal fallout from the leaked SHIELD files. The fic kind of grew from those two aims.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains AoU spoilers! Which I probably should have mentioned last chapter.

“So you and Banner, huh?” asks Steve. He’s smiling—really smiling--- and Natasha is relieved to see him so relaxed. Maybe it’s something to do with the Asgardian alcohol that Thor spiked his drinks with, or maybe it’s seeing some of his old war buddies—even if they are a bit wrinkled. Maybe he’s finally learning to accept that fact that the Winter Soldier—Bucky Barnes--- will only be found when he wants to be, and not a minute sooner. 

“Me and Banner what?” Natasha asks back, smiling herself.

“I’m happy for you guys, is all. Two of my friends are getting together, what’s not to like?”

“Better hope we don’t wreck the team dynamic,” Natasha says, sipping on the her martini. 

“Unless we have another alien invasion, I can’t see the world needing the Avengers anytime soon. We’re free agents, at least for the foreseeable future.”

“And what will you do with your time when you’re not apartment hunting in Brooklyn?”

“Looking for Bucky, probably,” sighs Steve, swirling his beer around in its bottle. 

“Let me know if you get anymore Russian leads. I might be able to help. Barnes and I did come from the same program, after all.”

“If I ever get my hands on the people who did that to him, to the both of you, then I do hope you’re there. I’m going to need someone to stop me from…” Steve admits, his face darkening.

“I probably won’t stop you for the reasons you’d want me to stop you, that’s why you have Sam. Besides, I doubt you’ll ever need someone to help you tell right from wrong, Cap,”

Steve smiles a little bit, but before he can reply, Sam saunters up to the pair of them.

“Did I hear someone say my name?” he asks, slightly drunk and leaning on Steve’s shoulder, “Also, Nat, what is this I hear about you and Banner?”

 

Of course everything goes to hell after that. Stark and Banner create a peacekeeping AI that decides the best way to maintain peace is to destroy the human race. And then there’s the weird Maximoff twin who gets inside Natasha’s head. 

Wanda Maximoff leaves Natasha shattered and vulnerable, neither of which are experiences she enjoys. Over and over again she tries to fail the exam. Over and over she’s forced into the operating room. Over and over she feels pride mixed in with the regret and the fear. 

Banner, if it’s possible, is even more of a wreck than she is. But he did just level several city blocks, so it isn’t surprising. 

They deal with Ultron. 

 

“You told him you _adored_ him?” Sharon asks, equal parts incredulous and amused. She’s set down her pistol on the stand in front of her, ignoring the fresh target just waiting for more of her perfect marksmanship. Natasha, in the booth next to her, tries to appear preoccupied by her own weapons. 

“And you wanted to run? Nat, what the hell?”

“I was being an idiot.”

“Yeah, you were. The Natasha Romanov I know doesn’t run form anything, and she certainly never directly tells men she ‘adores’ them. Fawning doesn’t suit you.” 

“I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Can I hazard a guess?”

“Not like I can stop you.”

“You want to prove to yourself that you can love someone.”

Natasha actually starts, setting her guns down and looking at Sharon.

“Well, you did just say fawning doesn’t suit me.”

“You know what I mean,” Sharon sighs, looking around them. “Come on,” she continues, going to store her handgun. “We’re going to have this conversation somewhere else.

‘Somewhere else’ turns out to be Sharon’s car as they drive back towards DC.

“Nat, I’m sorry I was so harsh earlier,” Sharon hedges, “but sometimes I think… I think you either wrap yourself up in witty quips and the calm, competent, deadly spy identity, or you desperately want to prove that you can love and be loved. And your entire personality changes.”

“Well, what I was molded into isn’t exactly something lovable.”

“But that’s my point. You’ve been free from the Red Room for almost ten years. You have discovered who you are, but you don’t let anyone see it. Clint, of course, and maybe me and Steve—“

“Steve? Since when are you two on first-name terms?”

“Don’t change the subject,” Sharon says brusquely, but a faint blush appears on her cheeks, “My point is that these files that you have—I know you want to find out what you did, but you are so much more than what you were used for.”

When Natasha doesn’t respond, Sharon keeps talking.

“And I know it may not be worth much coming from me, but I’d bet money that Clint will tell you the exact same thing. Find out what happened, by all means, but don’t let whatever guilt and the penance you think is appropriate swallow up the person you are today.”

Natasha nods. She can see the logic in it, and Sharon is probably right. 

“I was married, you know.”

Sharon, thank god, doesn’t screech or shout. Instead, she divides her attention between the road and Natasha, and only says “Really? When? To who?”

“His name was Alexei Shostakov. We were married in 1959, and he died in 1964.” 

“I’m so sorry, Nat.”

“It was an arranged marriage.”

“Did you love him?”

“In the end, I think I did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I adore Sharon Carter almost as much as I adore Nat. She doesn't get enough love/screen time in the MCU, although that promo art with Sharon at Steve's right hand made me so, so happy. 
> 
> Basically, Sharon Carter is a kick ass agent and human who has no time for anyone's bullshit. 
> 
> If you'd like 100% more Sharon Carter love in your life, please check me out on tumblr. bellagerantalli.tumblr.com


	7. Chapter 7

Natasha climbs the stairs to her apartment. Sharon dropped her off in front of her building after their talk, and then went on home. They’d made a promise to meet tomorrow for lunch. They're both back in SHIELD’s employ, and they hope that the mess hall has improved since the agency changed management. 

All thoughts of food and work disappear when Natasha sees that her door is ajar. 

She slinks up to it, pulling her gun out of its holster, slipping a magazine in, and holding it in front of her as she pushes the door back, careful to make sure that no one is hiding behind it before she enters the apartment. Her TV is on, and Natasha can hear the sound of a baseball game emanating from it.

“It’s just me, Nat,” Steve calls. Natasha hears him rise off the couch—just him, no one else, but she doesn’t put the gun down. 

“I found something that we need to talk about,” he says, helpfully keeping his hands where Natasha can see them, and keeping himself in her line of sight as she turns the corner and inspects the rest of the apartment for anyone else. 

“How did you get in here?” Natasha asks, thinking about the state-of-the-art security systems on this building.

“The lady at the front desk let me in after I looked at pictures of her grandkids for almost an hour.”

“That doesn’t sound like Monica.”

“Well I told her that you were my girlfriend’s best friend, and that you two were supposed to meet me here at noon and let me in. When you guys still weren’t here at one, she took pity on me and let me up,” Steve says “I left your door ajar to warn you,” he adds hastily at the end, seeing Natasha’s disapproving look.

“So you and Sharon finally got your act together?” is all Natasha asks.

“In a manner of speaking. Thanks for pestering me to ask her out, though.”

Natasha can’t help but smile. She is going to have a long string of questions ready for her lunch date with Sharon tomorrow.

“So, what are you here to ask me about?” she says, her wariness melting away as Steve reaches into her refrigerator and produces two bottles of a beer he knows Natasha likes. He must have picked them up on his way over here. 

“I finally got around to meeting with Sergei Rozanov,” he says, pulling the cap off one of the bottles and handing the beer to her. “He had some interesting information.”

“He’s an easy nut to crack. I got to him a couple of months ago, and he gave me everything.”

“He was very forthcoming,” Steve admits, “He also mentioned some sort of promise you made to him? Something about Captain America not coming after him if he continued to hand you intel,” he finishes, smiling hesitantly. 

“Since when have I ever made a sincere promise to anyone?”

“Clint. Sharon. Banner… I could probably go on.”

“Save your breath, there aren’t many more,” Natasha quips, moving to the couch. Steve follows, sitting down next to her. He takes a long pull from his bottle as Natasha sits in silence.

“Why did you do it, Nat?” he asks.

“He’s a bully who shouldn’t be in any position of power,” Nat says, cursing herself. She doesn’t sound at all convincing. 

“I can’t disagree, but that’s not why you did it. You had him in your pocket, Nat. You owned him, so to speak. Why did you give that up?”

“I remembered something while I was looking through my files,” Natasha whispers.

“Something about Bucky?” Steve asks hopefully.

“I’m not an avenging angel. I don’t fly around the world dispensing justice. That’s your job. And Rozanov was in dire need of justice.”

“I doubt I’m anything like an angel.”

“Blond hair, blue eyes, a huge chip on the shoulder and radiating divine justice and wrath? Sounds a lot like an angel to me, Steve.”

“Moving on. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“About Barnes?”

“Yeah, about Bucky.”

“We knew two different people, Steve.”

“I don’t believe that. From what Rozanov told me, and from what I know about you, he had to have been more than brainwashed a puppet, at least in the early years.”

“I only ever knew him as ‘The American,” Steve. He was my teacher, my partner, and my lover, at least for a little while, I think. You remember Bucky Barnes. Barnes had a life, a family, and a history. In the Red Room, none of us had that.”

“What do you actually remember, Nat?”

Nat remembers quite a bit, actually. Memories of the Winter Soldier first started bubbling up when she had her run-in with him in Odessa over five years ago. She remembers steady hands correcting her grip on the hilt of her knife. She remembers hard-won praise. She remembers a couple of missions, and of course she remembers sneaking around Moscow in the dark, climbing through each other’s windows and leaving their bedrooms in shambles by the end of each of their nights together. She remembers laying beside him in the dark as he curled strands of her red hair around his fingers. 

But she cannot tell Steve this.

“I remember enough,” she finally says.


	8. Chapter 8

Steve knows he’s not going to get much more out of Natasha, and leaves after they share another couple of beers and finalize some dates for the new Avengers base. When Natasha arrives in upstate New York a couple of days later to instruct the new Avengers recruits on some hand-to-hand combat techniques, Steve is polite enough not to mention their conversation. 

Things go well, until they don’t.

Natasha is filling out paperwork, just one of the many benefits of her new position as team leader. She has her own office, which she is actually expected to use. She’s deep in a mission report when someone knocks on her door, and before she has a chance to deny him permission to enter, Sam steps into the room. 

“Please tell me you have something fun for me to do,” Natasha asks, happily minimizing her report on her computer.

“I don’t think this is going to be fun, Nat,” Sam says, not even bothering to force a smile onto his face. 

“What’s going on?” she asks, rising from her seat and going to strap on her gauntlets. 

“Leave those, Cap needs you in the interrogation wing.”

“But these will make me so much more intimidating,” she replies, sighing as she places the gauntlets back in their secure safe. “Who am I interrogating?”

“You’re not. You’re… Just come with me, Nat,” Sam says, holding out his arm as if he wants to wrap it around Natasha.

They walk down to the interrogation wing. It sounds scarier than it actually is. Most of the rooms are actually quite comfortable, but all of them have two-way mirrors into smaller adjoining rooms so that Avengers who aren’t doing the questioning can watch the show. Sam leads Nat into one of these rooms. It looks onto a room that’s set up like a waiting room. On the other side of the glass, two women sit rigidly on the IKEA sofa, pointedly ignoring the steaming cups of coffee in front of them. One of the women is older, probably in her fifties or sixties. She has black hair liberally streaked with grey, and her face is lined in such a way that makes her seem older than she actually is. The woman next to her is obviously her daughter, and her face is filled with unmistakable indignation.

Watching them from the observation room is Steve, one hand resting on his chin, and the other curled up to his chest. 

“Who am I looking at, Steve?” Natasha asks, waiting to be handed a file or a tablet with information on it. But it doesn’t come. Instead, Steve turns to her, and gives her a questioning, probing look.

“Nat, does the name Peter Anhokin ring any bells?”

“No?” hazards Natasha, looking back into the waiting room. “Should it?” she asks, wariness creeping into her voice. 

“That woman out there claims to be Anna Anhokin, and that’s her daughter Galina. They’re claiming you assassinated Galina’s husband, and Anna’s father—a Soviet scientist named Peter Anhokin.”

“I… I don’t remember,” Natasha admits, “But I can look in my file and see if—“

“I’ve had it up to here with HYDRA’s damn files,” says Steve, turning away from Natasha and Sam, hands on his hips. He turns his head up to the ceiling, his eyes closed as he restlessly taps his foot. Finally, he turns around.

“You don’t remember anything about this?” he says.

“No. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t do it.”

“The Anhokins want you to resign from the team and turn yourself over for criminal prosecution,” says Steve through gritted teeth, “But I’m not going to let that happen.”

“Steve, I don’t need you to protect me. I can handle—“

“You are my friend and my teammate. I know that you would never willingly kill Anhokin now; now that you’re no longer a weapon for HYDRA to aim. And I’ll make sure that Galina and Anna know it, too.”

“Please, Steve, that’s not a good idea,” Natasha says, going to stand by the door in case Steve attempts to charge out. 

“I agree with Nat, Cap. You stay out of this. You met with them when they first came in. Let me and Nat handle this now,” Sam interjects, moving to stand by Nat.

“Are you saying I should just let Nat’s name be dragged through the mud?”

“It already has been, Cap, and I’m still here. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know how to handle myself,” Natasha says. “I’ll go and talk to them. I owe them that at least.”

“We don’t even know if you did kill Anhokin,” says Steve. “You can’t take responsibility for something you were brainwashed into doing and then forgetting.”

“But I do have some responsibility. Let me take it.”

“Again, I agree with Nat here,” Sam adds for a second time. Steve seems to consider this for a moment.

“So you just want to talk to them?” he asks Nat.

“Yes. I owe them that. And they can yell at me, if they want. They probably will. And when they do, Cap, you cannot come bursting into the room.”

“At least take Sam with you,” Steve says.

“Fine. Sam, care to be my mediator?”

“I’m here for whatever you need.”

 

Three minutes later, Natasha and Sam step into the waiting room. Nat can practically feel Steve’s gaze from the other side of the glass, and the hairs on her neck stand up as she approaches the two women on the couch. Now that she looks properly at Anna, Natasha starts to see younger features—features she must remember. It almost feels like she’s studied them. And she probably has.

“Mrs. Anhokin, Miss Anhokin” she begins, letting Sam extend his hand to each of the women. They both look at it disdainfully for a brief moment, and then look away. Galina, the daughter, turns back to Natasha, giving her the same look she gave Sam’s hand, except now there’s an angry set to her brow and her eyes are practically glowing. Anna looks away, her mouth set in a hard frown. 

“Sam told me why you’re here. I’m not going to plead my innocence. I probably did kill Peter Anhokin, and I am sorry I did.”

“You _probably_ killed my father?” asks Galina, her eyes shimmering with hate. “The KGB left your distinct calling card, and you probably killed him? Is this some legal bullshit?” she demands, her English slightly accented. She’s probably been educated, at least in part, in the United States. 

“This isn’t legal anything. You’ll get nothing but the truth from me.”

“Then why won’t you admit to murdering my father? He was going to defect, and your precious regime couldn’t have that.”

“What I did was wrong, I’m not going to deny that.”

“And you presumably feel guilty?”

“Yes. Every day,” Natasha admits. Anna has now turned her head so that she’s almost looking at Natasha, but not quite. Nat guesses she’s either about to stop her daughter, or go off on Natasha herself.

“And yet you say you presumably killed him?” Galina continues.

“I… I don’t know for sure. They wiped my memories after each mission, I don’t remember—“

“Then how can you feel guilt for something you cannot even remember?” demands Anna now, in Russian. She laughs bitterly, fingering the cross at her throat. “How comforting it must be for you! You don’t have to remember his face when he realized the bullet had struck. You can forget his screams, or his blood running onto the snow.”

“You claim to be sorry. And yet you killed my husband, and how many more? Have you killed so many that you don’t even remember them all? Do they all simply run together for you?” she demands, her voice rising. Galina, sitting beside her, looks smug at her mother’s outburst. 

“They wiped my memories after each mission. I don’t even know who my real parents are,” Natasha says, attempting to keep her voice level and calm.

“Then it’s a good thing they don’t know what their own flesh has become,” Anna spits. 

“Mrs. Anhokin,” Sam begins in English. “What the Widow is trying to say is that she doesn’t remember because her handlers, the people who used her as a weapon, wiped her memories to keep her docile. They knew her, and they knew that she wouldn’t accept any of the missions they sent her on without some sort of brainwashing.”

“She still committed crimes. She still killed my husband.”

“Yes, and she had admitted to it. She has expressed regret and remorse, and I know that if she was in the same situation now, she would choose to save your husband’s life, even if it meant losing her own.”

“She should be prosecuted. She should be shamed. She shouldn’t be up on the Avengers’ pedestal.”

“You want me to pay for my crimes,” Natasha says, cutting off Sam before he can get into a Steve-inspired speech about how she belongs on the team. “Fine. That’s understandable. Half the time I think I think I should be rotting in a Siberian prison. And if I wanted to simply pay for my crimes, I would turn myself in right now. I’ve made the world a cruel place for too many people— but as part of the Avengers, I can help make the world a little safer.”

“You are chasing atonement,” says Anna, “but you can never atone for what you’ve done. Not ever.”

Natasha is a little taken aback. There’s always been a part of her that hoped that all the good work she’s done for SHIELD, for the Avengers, for the world, would one eclipse the trail of death, destruction, and fear she’s left in her wake for most of her life. 

Maybe she’s wrong.

“I know I’ll probably never atone for it, but helping protect the Earth and the people on it is better than sitting useless in a maximum security prison,” she concludes, standing up. She takes a single business card from the pouch on her belt, and holds it out to Anna. Anna turns her head, so Natasha shifts to Galina.

“This is a number where you can reach me at any time,” she says as Galina takes the stiff paper card with a single phone number printed on it. “If you are ever in a position where your life is in danger, or you need help, call it.”

Galina studies the card, and then looks up at Natasha.

“What if we don’t want your help?” she asks.

“You may need it, and that is the best I can offer you.”

“If that’s all, Mrs. Anhokin, Miss Anhokin, then I think it’s time to go,” says Sam, standing as well. Anna snatches the card from Natasha’s hand, and the mother and daughter reluctantly rise from the seats on the couch, to follow Sam as he ushers them out of the room. He gives Natasha one quick, reassuring glance before he walks out the door. As soon as the group is a safe distance down the hall, Natasha leaves the room, only to find Steve standing outside the door.

“You don’t owe them anything, Nat.”

Nat laughs, hollow and pained.

“You Americans are loyal to a fault,” she says, giving him a soft kiss on the cheek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Anhokins come from an 'Avengers Assemble' arc written by Kelly Sue DeConnick. I am a hopeless fangirl. But if you haven't read that arc, you absolutely should!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is finally done! Thank you to everyone who's stuck with this fic. Comments are always appreciated. :)

Nat spends the rest of the afternoon in her office, paging through her files on her tablet. She finally finishes them. 

This is what she knows.

She was born sometime in the early 1920s, and she was taken into the Red Room around the age of seven. There are no records of her parents, or where she came from before the Red Room. She trained for over a decade, but was released early and was assigned to a division of the Red Army once war broke out with Germany. There are few records of this time, and for some reason all Natasha seems to remember from those years is a black ribbon around her finger, but that is a mystery for another day.

She returned to the Red Room and Department X in 1945. She graduated just over a year later. She ran various missions, everything from assassinations to honeypot operations. In the late 1950s she began training under the Winter Soldier, and began her affair with him. They were broken apart by 1958, and Natasha was married off the Red Guardian. Her memory was wiped for the first time. Alexei ‘died’ in 1963, and Natasha’s covert activities multiplied, except now she was a skilled sniper and got more and more assassination jobs. 

In the 1990s, the USSR collapsed. Natasha broke through some of her programming and became a sort of mercenary, until Barton made his call. From then on she worked for SHIELD.

And now Natasha is an Avenger. She has a nice office, several colleagues she can actually trust, and maybe a few she can even call friends. She spends her days taking out rogue HYDRA cells and foiling alien invasions. No one plays with her memories anymore. 

She sits in silence for a long time. Long enough for the automatic lights to come on outside as the daylight fades, for the other agents working in the building to file out on their way home for the evening, chatting about their weekend plans as they walk to their cars. She gets a texts from both Sam and Steve letting her know that the rest of the team is going out to a local bar if she wants to join them, and that if she wants to talk, they’re both there for her. She gets a message from Sharon stating something similar, and she even offers to drive up for the weekend if that’s what Natasha needs. Steve must have told her about the Anhokins. 

Natasha moves from her office to her apartment within the complex. She hasn’t lived here for long, so there are few personal touches in the space besides some photographs on a side table by her couch. They’re all pictures taken in the last two years. One is of Natasha and Sharon, the two of them lounging on the porch swing at the Barton Family Farm. Another pictures her, Sam, and Steve at the premature, ultimately disastrous Victory Revels. The most recent is a photo of Clint and Laura surrounded by all three of their kids, the newborn Nathaniel perched on his father’s lap. 

She walks through the doorway, and flips the light switch. Only the lights closest to the door illuminate, instead of the entire room, and Natasha braces for an attack, grabbing a loaded gun from her belt.

“You’ve really made a life for yourself, haven’t you?” says a deep, familiar voice in Russian. It comes from a shape on the couch, which Natasha, edging closer, her hands steady, notices is a man, hunched over with his face turned towards her. 

The light closest to the door doesn’t illuminate his face, but Natasha remembers his voice. 

“Why are you here?” she asks, debating whether or not to sound the alarm. 

The Winter Solider must hear that hitch in her voice, because he turns the lamp on the table beside him. For a moment, Natasha almost lowers her gun. The man in front of her is not the man she encountered on the freeway in DC all those months ago, nor the man in Odessa who shot through her years ago. He’s closer to the man who Natasha probably loved back in the 1950s, but there’s a… shame that wasn’t there before. There’s a pained hunch to his posture, and his eyes are rimmed with enormous dark circles that tell Natasha he hasn’t slept properly in months. He’s ditched his uniform for a pair of ragged jeans and a stained sweatshirt, and he seems to have ditched most of his weapons as well. Natasha can count only three different knives, a fourth probably hidden in his boot, and no firearms. It’s probably the absolute minimum he can carry and still feel safe at this stage. His cybernetic arm is completely covered by his sweatshirt, and his left hand is gloved. 

He’s almost clean-shaven, though, and it looks like he’s made an attempt to wash and comb his hair. It doesn’t look nearly as greasy as the last time Nat saw it, and the Soldier has pulled it up into a bun to keep it out of his eyes. It’s a good look for him, even if Natasha prefers his hair shorter. 

“I think I’m ready. To see you, and to see Steve, but if you want me to leave I can,” he says, standing up from the couch and holding his hands above his head. 

“How did you even get in here?” Nat asks, still pointing the gun at him.

“I waited until everyone had left but you. I’ve been waiting for days, and shit that sounds creepy. But I dodged the sensors on the grounds and the ones on the building aren’t really that hard to disable. So I, uh, climbed up through your window.”

“Just like old times?” 

For a moment, the Soldier’s eyes light up. 

“You remember?” he asks, his mouth twitching at the corners.

“I remember some of it. What do you remember?”

“Almost all of it. You were the only good thing, Natalia.”

Natasha considers the Soldier for a moment. His hands are still above his head, and he’s still probably a little bit of a threat, but he’s so earnest that Natasha begins to consider that maybe he actually has broken through some of his programming.

“Don’t move,” she replies, and gets closer to him. “I’m going to pat you down and remove any weapons I find. Keep your hands above your head.”

“And if you don’t remove all of the weapons?” he asks, glancing up at his cybernetic arm.

“Then I deserve whatever I get. Hold still.”

She sets her own gun down and gives the Winter Solider a thorough search, removing four knives, just as she suspected. She takes them, positions the Solider so that he's standing near one end of the couch, and allows him to lower his arms.

“Sit down,” she commands, and the Soldier obeys.

“So you think you’re ready to see us? What if we’re not ready to see you?” she asks, taking a seat on the other side of the couch and setting the knives on the table closest to her.

“Steve’s been trying to follow me all over the world, and you haven’t kicked me out yet,” he points out. 

“True, although if I did that I’d probably feel like I’d kicked a puppy out into the rain. Where did you go after the fight in DC?”

“I went to the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian. And then I went to Brooklyn, and then Russia. By that time, though, Brock Rumlow was trying to track me down, and he did a considerably better job than Steve.”

“Steve eventually got him, though,” Natasha notes, remembering the triumphant look on Steve’s face when he and Wanda brought “Crossbones” in. 

“Yeah, he did. And I think he caught sight of me, too, but he stayed away.”

“He’s getting better at letting people come to him when they’re ready. Why did you come to me first, though? Don’t tell me you think I’m less scary than Steve.”

The Soldier—James Barnes, laughs.

“Trust me, you terrify me, but I can handle your scary. Steve is—“

“He’s not going to be disappointed in you.”

“He will be when he finds out what I’ve done.”

“I think he already knows. And if he hasn’t kicked me off of the team yet, then I think you’ll be fine.”

The half-smile on Barnes’s face disappears, replaced with a quiet, angry frown.

“I saw the Anhokins pay a visit today,” he admits. 

“Just how closely have you been watching me, Barnes?” Natasha asks.

Barnes smiles again “Just for the past several days. And what did they want?”

“They wanted me to resign in disgrace and face trial,” Natasha admits. “And how do you know about the Anhokin’s?”

“They were considering me for the job, but gave it to you instead,” Barnes states simply, shrugging his shoulders. 

“Do you remember that, or did you read it somewhere?”

“I read it,” Barnes admits. 

“I didn’t recognize them when they came in. I only finished reading all the files on me after they left.”

“So what do you remember?”

“Hmm, not sure I want you to know. Ask me again sometime.” 

“So there’ll be a next time?” Barnes asks, the smile reappearing. This is the man Natasha remembers. The one who smiles easily, who will be straight with her even their lives shouldn’t allow it, and who is just dangerous enough to be interesting. 

“Assuming you survive the hug you get from Steve and the interrogation you get from Nick Fury.”

“And assuming you don’t ship yourself off to some Siberian gulag.”

“I can’t do that. I would get behind on my paperwork.”

“And the Avengers would fall apart without you,” Barnes adds.

“I’m going to ask you again, how long have you been watching me?”

“Well, there was that time back in the 50s, and then these last few days, of course. And I may have been hacking the Avengers system over the last year or so.”

“And Stark said his codes were unbreakable,” Natasha says, rolling her eyes.

“Well, then it’s a good thing I stole some of his tech to get through them,” Barnes says, a hint of bravado creeping into his voice as he pulls a Stark flash drive from his pocket. 

A laugh escapes Natasha. A genuine, full-on laugh, and Barnes looks so pleased with himself that it keeps Natasha smiling long after her laugh is gone. It seems to keep him smiling, too. 

And maybe it’s been the long day she’s had, or its surprise ending, but Natasha never expected to get through her file and feel like this. Yes, she feels guilt. She’ll probably feel it every day for the rest of her life. She feels remorse for the trail of blood she left behind her. She’s angry at her handlers for using her like weapon, aiming her at whoever got in their way, but she’s also angry with herself for coming back after the War. There’s a part of her, although it’s smaller than it once was, that blames herself for everything. 

She’s proven to herself that she can love, and that’s something.

But she can’t devote the rest of her life to some sort of penance or blame-game. It’s no way to live. She wouldn’t choose that for Clint, or even Barnes, although she thinks he would probably choose it for himself. If she’s going to continue to be the best at what she does, she needs all the skills she ever learned from the Red Room. She needs them all so that she can make sure nothing like it ever happens again. 

For now, though, she texts Sharon and asks her to come up for the weekend. Natasha tries not to grin at the thought of Sharon spending her days off helping both her boyfriend and her best friend process their feelings (because Steve is going to have a lot of them once he and Barnes are reunited), but she doesn’t quite manage it. She calls Sam and Steve back from the bar, and witnesses a reunion seventy years in the making. Both Steve and Barnes cry a lot, and the look of relief on Sam’s face is priceless when he realizes Barnes has no intention of killing anyone.

She stays up through the night, digging through the cardboard boxes in her closet to find the things she brought from DC to make her apartment look less like a hotel room. She’s done before the sun rises, and so she decides to call Clint on the off chance he might be awake with Nathaniel.

The phone rings three times before Clint answers.

“Who the fuck is calling at four am?” he grumbles, still groggy with sleep.

“It’s Natasha,” she says, letting her smile show in her voice.


End file.
